Ambition

In the vast universe of ambiguous terms that are earnestly invoked, ambition looms large.  We nod our heads sagely when we hear that someone ‘has a lot of ambition’.  Parents tell their children that they must be ambitious to be successful and happy in life.  Top executives, sports stars and celebrities of all types are praised for their ambition.

But what is ambition?  Dictionaries define it as ‘an ardent desire for rank, fame, wealth or power’, or alternatively, ‘a desire to achieve a particular end’, or even ‘a desire for work or activity’.  These are three very different meanings, and I believe the differences lie at the heart of much of human anguish, heartache and conflict.

If we are ambitious to achieve some kind of recognized worldly success – fame, wealth, power, rank – then our happiness and fulfillment are tied to that goal and we may find it an elusive one. For these aims are closely linked to our ego.  They correspond to a desire to be acknowledged as superior to others.

The addiction to that kind of vanity is a need that can never truly be satisfied.  There is always someone wealthier, more famous, more powerful.   Under the veneer of confidence and self-satisfaction there is always the deep, lurking awareness that those accolades are empty and that one’s life has become a charade of fulfillment.

If, however, our ambition is indeed primarily a ‘desire for work or activity’, then the joy and satisfaction derived from that kind of ambition is incorruptible.  There is no limit to the ways that this ambition may be fulfilled, no end to the activities that may be undertaken. 

Many people start out with their ‘ambition’ truly being an expression of energy and inquiry.  They become fascinated by something or discover that they have a talent or skill in some area.  At first, the sheer joy of performing that activity is what drives them.  The acquisition of knowledge or expertise is the sole object of their ambition.  Their native curiosity and creative instinct move them forward. 

But as they win praise or awards for their efforts, they risk being seduced by that recognition, and the pure joy of doing and discovering is slowly displaced by the insidious need for affirmation and adulation.

Human beings are social creatures, and the need for positive feedback from others has no doubt been deeply embedded in our DNA over millennia of evolution.  We will always want our efforts and achievements to be acknowledged in some manner by others in our circle of acquaintance.  But the acquired addiction to public acclaim and renown, or to massive wealth and power, is more closely related to the darker sides of human nature.

If I write a story, then I have created something, and if it is pleasing to me then I am satisfied in the effort.  If others read the story with pleasure, then that is also a good thing. But if that story becomes famous and I become a celebrated author, then it is more than likely that I will no longer write solely for the love of creation but will be ever more attuned to my ascension in the literary world and derive my pleasure from that fickle abstraction.

Of course there is, alas, much of human ambition that is focused from the start on power, fame and wealth.  As in all things, moderation may be viewed as a watchword in these cases. There is nothing wrong with the goal of achieving financial stability or a position that provides interesting and challenging activities.  Climbing the corporate ladder or starting a company can be a wonderful experience, and part of the allure of these accomplishments is the attainment of a comfortable lifestyle and a position that allows one to have impact or control.

But all too often the seductive nature of power and wealth acts to create an unseemly lust that overwhelms the innocent purposes of self-fulfillment.  The energy and the goals are soon skewed toward the extremes.  The balance is lost.

Ambition is, like many things in life, a continuum that defies easy praise or condemnation.  It seems to me that leaning toward ‘desiring work or activity’ as opposed to cultivating an ‘ardent desire for rank, fame, wealth or power’ is the healthy and positive way to form ambition.  It would seem to offer a much less volatile path to a satisfactory life experience and have much less of a negative impact on the world.

Vigilantism is All the Rage!

The vigilantes are the new cool kids on the block!  Kyle Rittenhouse, a mentally challenged policeman wannabe, self-appointed militiaman and gun nut, is acquitted of all charges after killing two and wounding another at a violent protest that would otherwise have ended in property damage but no fatalities.  His claim of self-defense in an open carry state with a loosely interpreted castle doctrine was too difficult to disprove.

A Texas law deputizes private citizens and promises them financial gain for investigating and suing patients or providers of abortions performed after 6 weeks, which is close to the time that most women even know they are pregnant.

Three armed men pursue an unarmed black jogger in trucks and confront him in South Georgia, ultimately killing him.  The case is being tried now.

People armed with semi-automatic and automatic weapons assemble outside of state houses and at meetings throughout the COVID pandemic, protesting any restrictions on their lives and threatening governors, legislators, school board members and other public officials.

Yes, vigilantism is alive and well in the USA!  If you were wondering what in the world Americans would do with the sea of guns that has inundated our country, here is one answer.  Another answer is that they would turn ordinary disagreements or domestic disputes or road rage into shooting fatalities.  And yet another is that suicides by gun would climb ever higher.  But I digress.  Back to our proud vigilantes.

There is nothing American men love more than to strut around with a cool gun in their hands.  And they often add a camo outfit as a great accessory, along with sunglasses and an ammo belt or two.  After all, the more you can pretend to be a Navy SEAL, the manlier it makes you feel.

The nation is going to hell in a handbasket, so we need all the good guys with guns we can get, right?  Even though we have endowed the police with SWAT teams galore and wet dream-worthy piles of military equipment, they clearly need the help of testosterone-addled, social-media-brainwashed wingnuts with AR-15s and Glocks. 

God Bless our brave patriots!   With all those lefty judges, socialist legislators, election-stealers, Marxist professors and looters (i.e. people of color), the only hope we have is to let loose a big wave of armed vigilantes to keep America safe (and white and virginal and heterosexual and segregated).

Our favorite American myth is the Wild West, so it is only fitting that we are regressing back to the days of vigilante justice and gun-toting machismo.  But the eager vigilantes fearing the decline of the American Empire might be surprised to discover that they are actually at the very core of that decline and accelerating it with each act of armed protest or insurrection.

Supreme Court Mythology

With the Supreme Court about to rule on several abortion lawsuits that could reshape Roe v. Wade, it seems like a good time to try to understand what the hell the Supreme Court is actually supposed to do.

A warning:  my take on this is a bit glib and very contrarian.  Lawyers will scoff and deride my analysis as simplistic and totally off base.  And to be honest, what follows is a bit tongue and cheek and takes some liberties with the complexity of Supreme Court decisions.  The Supreme Court has been instrumental in making some very important progress in our society.  However, I don’t think it has a damn thing to do with the constitution or legal precedent.

 

Here is an excerpt from the government site on the history of the Supreme Court:

 

“The best-known power of the Supreme Court is judicial review, or the ability of the Court to declare a Legislative or Executive act in violation of the Constitution. It is not found within the text of the Constitution itself. The Court established this doctrine in the case of Marbury v. Madison (1803).”

 

The Supreme Court is the court of last appeal.  Its purpose is to interpret and enforce laws in ways that support the constitution, since that document is the primary source for how we want the nation to function.

 

But let’s face it, the constitution is a pretty terse document.  The bill of rights is a paltry 462 words.  Nuance is not its strong point.  Like most things in life, the constitution is rife with ambiguity and can only really serve as a general guidebook.

 

Yet somehow everyone wants to pretend that this document is some sort of holy grail that we can use to precisely define the way we live, even though it was written when slavery was legal (and many of the authors were slaveholders), when native Americans were being exterminated, when women had absolutely no rights, when the majority of Americans were citizen-farmers, before any significant industrialization had occurred and when science was only beginning to inform our understanding of the world.

 

But putting the question of how sacrosanct this document really is aside, the absurdity of grown men and women with prestigious pedigrees pretending to be able to adjudicate issues based on interpreting this document is rich.  It is pure farce! 

 

The reality is that the justices may convince themselves that they have some rationale for their opinions based on previous case law and the constitution itself, but it all really comes down to how they personally view what are basically social, economic and political issues, and how they interpret and either embrace or object to the Zeitgeist of the times.  And then they justify these highly personal views or interpretations with long diatribes that pretend to be academic and technical.

Now admittedly, the Supreme Court is not quite as partisan and venal as congress.  They do seem generally to take their jobs very seriously and earnestly investigate the issues at hand.  However, in the end, they are human beings with their own biases and given the lack of detailed guidance in either the constitution or the other laws of the land, they will ultimately find ways to argue on behalf of their own political, social, economic or moral philosophies.

 

The examples of the court flip-flopping on issues are numerous:  slavery, rights to vote, civil rights, affirmative action, abortion, gun control, unionization.  The constitution has absolutely nothing to do with all of this!  It is just partisan, contemporary politics, plain and simple.  The court tries to rise above partisanship, but there is simply no way to avoid it.

 

Take abortion.  Does the constitution really have any bearing on this issue?  Where to draw the line between the rights of the fetus and the rights of the mother is purportedly the key question.  But the arguments quickly go into biological and religious territory that the constitution does not address at all. 

 

I guess if you put robes on people and allow them to keep their office forever it lends a certain aura of respectability and seriousness, as though they are above the fray.  But it doesn’t really fool anyone.  I believe we all know deep down that the Supreme Court is simply a group of people that politicians have chosen to represent their strongly held beliefs and put up a good façade of intellectual credibility, and that this whole constitution ruse is one big smokescreen!

 

 

A Reasonable Approach to COVID in 2022

A pandemic is a confusing event, as we have discovered.  It is science in real time.  Much has been said about the sometimes puzzling and occasionally even contradictory messages coming from governments and scientists.  But our understanding of COVID-19 and its ramifications is constantly evolving, and it is extremely difficult to chart a perfect course of action and recommendations.  We should all be extremely grateful to the scientists and medical professionals who have worked tirelessly to confront this crisis.

Europe now appears to be entering its fourth wave of infection.  If the past two years are any guide, the USA will follow in a month or two.  Vaccinations have reduced the relative number of hospitalizations and deaths, but there are still large numbers of unvaccinated people and there is almost zero probability of achieving true ‘herd immunity’.

Should we view COVID-19 as an endemic disease now?  Should life go on as normal with a few basic restrictions?  These are difficult questions, but I believe there are a few basic guidelines that make sense.

First, vaccinations should be strongly encouraged for everyone and even mandated in certain areas (healthcare and retirement communities for example).  There is enough data available now to prove that the risks of any vaccine side effects are vastly lower than the risk of COVID in an unvaccinated adult.  Any responsible leader should emphatically endorse vaccination.

It is reasonable to raise the question as to whether instituting or continuing draconian shutdown measures may have more negative impact than the virus itself at this stage in the pandemic.  It was, however, unreasonable and highly unethical to argue against those measures at the outset of the pandemic.  The ultimate metric for those decisions is clearly the burden on the healthcare system.

When hospitals and healthcare workers are overwhelmed by serious COVID cases, as they were at the onset of the pandemic and several other times in the past two years, society must do everything in its power to reduce that burden.  A full breakdown of the healthcare system - doctors and nurses dying or abandoning their practices from fatigue or discouragement – is a catastrophic event with very long-term consequences.  Moreover, such an event will precipitate higher death counts because of the saturation of available ICU’s and ventilators. 

The UK data from before and after the vaccine gives us some encouragement for hoping that we can treat the pandemic with more moderate measures.  It is a good test case because the country is highly vaccinated (over 90% in adults over 40 - see the chart below) and has essentially eliminated all protective measures in the general population.

The UK CFR (case fatality rate) for the period from late November2020 to late February 2021 was about 2.5%.  For the post-vaccine period from late June to today, the CFR was about 0.3%, or about one eighth as much.  That is a dramatic decrease in the death rate.  This is especially interesting because the average daily number of new cases in the latter period was significantly higher (35k/day) than during the earlier period (29k/day). 

The USA will have a more difficult time unless vaccination rates improve dramatically.  During the same time that the UK had a CFR of 0.2, the USA had a CFR of 1.1, more than five times that of the UK.  This can only really be interpreted as an emphatic endorsement of the vaccine.  Sadly, our political polarization has made the vaccine a tribal litmus test for many in this country.

Whether the UK healthcare system is still under tremendous pressure is difficult for me to discern in a quick look online.  My guess is that there are pockets of distress and that the future will be a whack-a-mole game of employing vaccines, surgical shutdowns or protective measures and new treatment regimens to minimize the hospitalizations and deaths while allowing life to go on as close to normal as possible.

In my opinion, the reasonable way to proceed is to recognize that our healthcare systems must be protected at all costs.  Life can go back to semi-normal, but the minute we see a region where the healthcare system is in grave danger we must act decisively and initiate whatever measures are necessary.

The Evolution of the Nerd – from Zero to Hero to Megalomaniacal Villain

I don’t perceive myself as a classic nerd, though I have some nerdy characteristics – highly analytical, a tendency to be very precise with numbers, a strong interest in nerd topics such as science, technology and math. 

The truth is that I blundered into the technology field without really having an intense desire to become a techie or an engineer.  And I very nearly abandoned the technology path in the middle of my freshman year of college after a quarter focused on Chinese politics and French existentialism.  However, an intriguing physics course and a romance with a physics major provided enough inertia to keep me headed down the science path and then into engineering and computers.

All this is to say that I once understandably celebrated the transformation of the lowly Nerd from a caricature cog in the technology business to the hero of the computer and information revolution.  But sadly, the evolution of the Nerd has exceeded all expectations and become yet another cautionary tale of human temptation.

The space race and the subsequent computer revolution signaled the first subtle ascendancy of the Nerd engineer and programmer in society.  Cultural catalysts like Star Trek and Star Wars accelerated the pace. 

At first, the Nerd was a curious oddity – the necessary but somewhat comical sidekick of the heroic adventurers.  The caricature image of an unattractive guy with thick glasses, a pocket protector, a belt several inches too long and high-water pants was the stereotype.  He was a whiz at all things technical, but hardly an object of veneration, and often one of ridicule.  His technology skills were impressive, but no one really wanted to be him!

Solid evidence that the Nerd was gaining new respect came in the form of a movie franchise called ‘The Revenge of the Nerds’, which first appeared in 1984.  By this time Apple computers had been out for several years and the iconic Macintosh was launched in January 1984.

In Revenge of the Nerds, not only do the Nerd heroes exact revenge on their frat boy tormentors, but the lead Nerd even gets the pretty girl!  This transition from a valuable but slightly peculiar supporting role to star status heralded the creation of the new tech mythology.

The rapid assimilation of computer technology into our everyday lives and the recognition that computer entrepreneurs were becoming fabulously rich burnished the legend considerably.  Suddenly computer geeks were cool, especially if they had prospects of cashing in on their expertise.

Several movies followed that developed the trope of the former high school class dweeb showing up at a reunion as a millionaire tech entrepreneur with new confidence and flair.  The Nerd became a figure of respect and even envy, maybe a little dorky around the edges but with enough money and prestige to compensate.

As the 90’s came and went, bringing us the Internet, and the 2000’s accelerated the pace of technology with ipods, smartphones, Teslas, google and social media (ugh!), the billionaire tech wizards (perhaps questionable how much true wizardry there was behind much of what made billions – but that is another story) became our cultural icons with a position not far beneath movie stars, rock stars and British royalty – Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and a host of lesser heroic Nerds.

Then suddenly, the hero myth began to turn Greek.  The tragic flaws of the tech titans and their technologies became all-too-apparent:  the monopolies, the uber-wealth, the ironically fratboy-like workplaces, the incestuous manipulation of the marketplace, the appalling menace of social media, the arrogance and narcissistic expressions of massive egos.

The Nerd had become Frankensteinian.  With more money and power than anyone should ever have at their disposal, today the tech masters of the world are no longer the sought-after destroyers of the old empire as pictured in the renowned Apple super bowl ad, but rather the new plutocrats of an increasingly polarized and authoritarian society.

I am reminded of the last scene of Orwell’s Animal Farm, when the pigs and the humans are sitting together at a banquet and the once revolutionary pigs have taken on all the characteristics of their former persecutors.  But instead of pigs and humans, it is Nerds and the industrial robber barons.  And we are the creatures gazing with incredulity at the scene.  “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

Numbers, Statistics and Misconceptions

Numbers are confusing to most people.  Few of us are comfortable with statistics and really understand how to interpret them.  Any lingering numerical skills from the painful years of high school math are gleefully jettisoned, and we are easily led astray when confronted with any sort of statistical analysis.

Numbers can also be cynically manipulated or naively misused.  Numbers and statistics are ultimately representations of events, and the meaning behind the numbers must be clear in order to ensure the correct interpretation.

A powerful example of this occurred about six months into the pandemic, when the CDC reported that 94% of COVID deaths had other morbidities associated with the death.  Very quickly large numbers of social media posts and talking heads interpreted that to mean that only 6% of the reported COVID deaths were actually caused by COVID.  This misinterpretation persists even today and there are many Americans who believe the number of COVID deaths is radically overcounted.

But here is the highly probable truth:

First of all, no one really dies solely from COVID.  The virus manifests itself in other pathologies such as pneumonia, respiratory distress or cardiac arrest.  The attending physician will add those pathologies to the death certificate, along with any known factors that may have made them more susceptible – diabetes, obesity, cancer, weakened immunity, etc. – to provide as much information as possible for later analysis.

But how can one know for sure that these people didn’t die from those other problems?  Perhaps the COVID virus was just present, not a contributing factor.  Here is where additional statistical (not anecdotal!) data plays a decisive role – the number of EXCESS DEATHS.

The total number of deaths in the USA is tracked and is predictable to within a small margin of error each year based on historical data.  Thus, the number of excess deaths in 2020 over what would have been expected is a very good estimate for the true number of COVID deaths and is probably more accurate than the confirmed number.  There were 3.38 million deaths in 2020 versus 2.85 million in 2019 (see the graph below and the dramatic step between 2019 and 2020). This would mean that the 2020 COVID deaths are closer to 500k!  The death rate (number of deaths per one thousand people) had an 18% increase in one year, from 8.7 to 10.3.

 Over eight hundred thousand people will have officially died from COVID in the USA by the end of 2021. There were about 380k confirmed COVID deaths in 2020 and there will be at least 450k in 2021.  But when one analyzes the excess death data it is extremely likely that the total number of COVID deaths for the two years will exceed one million!

 

 

 

They Were Expendable

In an earlier blog post I wrote about the unconscionable use of anti-vaccine policies to bolster the Trumpian credentials of Republican governors such as Abbott and DeSantis, and how their incredibly selfish and narcissistic acts were resulting in increased sickness and death in their states. 

It is now mid-October 2021, and what should have been a summer of relief from COVID and a resumption of somewhat normal life has been torpedoed by an anti-vax movement that has been promoted and led by Trump’s sycophants and the craven politicians who see their future in his wake.

I have examined the deaths that have occurred in ten states that represent a cross-section of blue and red states – states that strongly encouraged or even mandated vaccinations for their citizens and those that squandered their opportunity to protect their citizens by attacking vaccine mandates and making idiotic speeches about freedom.

I have calculated the number of deaths per million people (thus normalizing the numbers so that there is an apple to apple comparison) that have occurred from April 1 to Oct 13.  I chose April 1 because vaccines were really starting to have an impact at that point in states that embraced them.  It was also the time when the delta variant began to play a significant role.

It is also important to note that less than 2% of COVID deaths in this time period were vaccinated people.

These statistics dramatically illustrate the difference in deaths between states that embraced the vaccine and those who made it a political issue.  

There have been over 165,000 deaths since April 1.  The excess deaths in red states where governors and republican legislators have fought the vaccine, as well as the collateral damage in all states of conservatives who died embracing the so-called ‘freedom’ that the death cult has espoused, easily exceed 1/3 of those deaths, or about 55,000. 

I guess if you have Trumpian presidential aspirations or are a brainwashed right-winger who somehow cannot acknowledge any societal obligations, then those 55,000 deaths don’t mean much to you.  Either your own grotesque ambition or some toxic mixture of demented myths and lies has hijacked your humanity.  The dead won’t haunt you, because you have no conscience.  The people who died were just a necessary sacrifice. They were expendable.